I mean war always has been a part of our life since the first civilizations was established. I’m sure “shellshock” wasn’t only caused by artilery shots.
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Shell shock refers to a unique form of PTSD. It’s not fair, strictly speaking, to think it’s a synonym for PTSD.
PTSD itself has been around and known about since prehistory. PTSD is only the latest in a line of labels we use to describe the effect on soldier’s minds of going to war. Battle fatigue, was I believe the term in WWII.
But the reason I posted this to begin with is, I think I can explain to you what shell shock actually is. See, for the first time in history we finally had really big guns, with really strong supply lines, with really well trained gunners, and a motivation to see what would happen if we turned them all up to 11.
Imagine you’re in a trench; muddy, wet, dirty, cold, scared, hungry, angry, and sad. And then the enemy guns open up. The noise is indescribably loud. To the point of pain. It’s like pressing your ear to a base drum while someone beats the other side. Like one of those big drums the high school band drummer plays.
And just like those drums, you can feel it in your belly. In your bones. But easily ten times worse. If it hits close enough the whole world tilts for a second. The earth shakes. What is firm and secure and safe, even, becomes mobile and fluid and dangerous.
But wait there’s more. Every once in a while, just often enough to mess up your head, an entire section of the trench, all the men and equipment in it, just get ‘unmade’. Plus plenty of screaming, gore, and horror.
Did you think we were done? We’re not. See…it doesn’t stop. Ever. It’s not like they fired for a few minutes, a few hours, a day or two. Sometimes those artillery shells fell for 40 days straight. Where every one booms in your ears, shakes your body, grabs you by the collar and screams in your face that it wants to horribly kill you.
There were some places along the Western front where 9 shells per square meter were fired. 9 artillery shells won’t fit into a square meter. It’s just days and days and days of the earth shaking, of the universe banging on your ear drums, of your body being hammered by constant percussion. Like “Chinese water torture” or your annoying little brother who copies a word or phrase and won’t stop saying it over and over again until you want to strangle him. But you can’t stop it. You don’t even know, other than vaguely, where it’s coming from. If it will hit you. It just goes on and on and on forever. When it stops you don’t know if it’s a lull or it’s stopping so the enemy can charge.
It doesn’t even have to hit anywhere near you to batter your sanity to it’s knees. To make you want to do something, anything, to get out of there, to make it stop, to end the torture. You can’t sleep. It’s almost impossible to eat, shower, use the latrine, have a conversation, think, or function. Because you can literally put your hand down on the ground in your trench (don’t because rats and water and bacteria; ew gross) and feel the earth shake and tremor with each impact.
This is true shell shock. It was such a problem that all other “battle fatigue” just got lumped into the same category, mostly by journalists, politicians, pop culture experts and other people who should never have the voice they do, but it makes sense.
There’s also some element of…you get concussions by battering your brain around in your skull, how much external shock waves can you take before that becomes an issue? But I don’t know as much about that element and or how much it was a factor. I know a few veterans or family members thereof blamed that for their problems. Whether it was or not I can’t say.
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